Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are ubiquitous in critical infrastructures such as electrical power generation, transmission, and distribution networks, water management, and transportation, but also in both industrial and home automation. For flexibility, convenience, and efficiency, CPS are increasingly supported by commodity hardware and software components that are deliberately interconnected using open standard general purpose information and communication technology (ICT).

The long life-cycles of CPS and increasingly incremental changes to these systems require novel approaches to the composition and inter-operability of services provided. The paradigm of service-oriented architectures (SoA) has successfully been used in similar long-lived and heterogeneous software systems. However, adapting the SoA paradigm to the CPS domain requires maintaining the security, reliability and privacy properties not only of the individual components but also, for complex interactions and service orchestrations that may not even exist during the initial design and deployment of an architecture.

An important consideration therefore is the design and analysis of security mechanisms and architectures able to handle cross domain inter-operability over multiple domains involving components with highly heterogeneous capabilities.